Daily Practice · GCSE Computer Science

March 1977 5-a-day

Every sheet in March 1977

The same date always regenerates the same five questions, so a sheet you print today is the sheet a classmate prints tomorrow.

  1. 1st March 1977State the condition that must be met before a binary search can be used on an array.
  2. 2nd March 1977A logic circuit has inputs C and D. C feeds into a NOT gate; the output of the NOT gate and D feed into an OR gate, giving output Y. Write the Boolean expression for Y and state its value when C = 1 and D = 0.
  3. 3rd March 1977Convert the 8-bit binary number 10110100 directly to hexadecimal by splitting it into nibbles.
  4. 4th March 1977Which piece of network hardware connects a LAN to another network such as the internet, directing data packets based on IP address?
  5. 5th March 1977Describe what syntax highlighting is and how it helps a programmer.
  6. 6th March 1977Convert the denary number 45 to hexadecimal.
  7. 7th March 1977What does the acronym CPU stand for?
  8. 8th March 1977State what the term malware means.
  9. 9th March 1977Trace this algorithm with data = [4, 9, 2, 9, 7] and state the final output. total = 0; count = 0; for i = 0 to 4: if data[i] > 5 then total = total + data[i] and count = count + 1; next i; print(total, count).
  10. 10th March 1977An uncompressed file is 6000 KB. After lossless compression it is 1500 KB. Calculate the compression ratio in the form n:1 (original size : compressed size).
  11. 11th March 1977Which of RAM and ROM is volatile, meaning its contents are lost when the power is removed?
  12. 12th March 1977Which piece of UK legislation controls how organisations must store and use people's personal data?
  13. 13th March 1977Given x = 5 and y = 8, state whether x < y AND x > 0 evaluates to True or False.
  14. 14th March 1977A function is defined as: FUNCTION addTax(price) RETURN price x 1.2 ENDFUNCTION. Another line of code runs: total <- addTax(20) + addTax(30). Trace both function calls and state the final value of total.
  15. 15th March 1977Give one reason why RAM on its own is not enough, and a computer also needs secondary storage.
  16. 16th March 1977Explain the role of TCP when a large file is downloaded.
  17. 17th March 1977A password field requires between 6 and 12 characters. State two boundary data values that should be used to test this field.
  18. 18th March 1977A table called staff has fields staffId, name, department and salary, storing these records: staffId | name | department | salary, 1 | Ben | Sales | 24000, 2 | Chloe | IT | 31000, 3 | Dan | Sales | 27000. State which staffId(s) would be returned by: SELECT staffId FROM staff WHERE department = 'Sales' AND salary > 25000;
  19. 19th March 1977State one function carried out by the operating system of a computer.
  20. 20th March 1977In computational thinking, what is meant by the term 'decomposition'?
  21. 21st March 1977Given A = 1 and B = 1, state the value of A AND B.
  22. 22nd March 1977Convert the 8-bit binary number 01011010 to denary.
  23. 23rd March 1977Define a peer-to-peer network.
  24. 24th March 1977Give one advantage and one disadvantage of using a compiler.
  25. 25th March 1977Convert the denary number 5 to a 4-bit binary number.
  26. 26th March 1977A CPU has a clock speed of 4.0 GHz. Calculate how many clock cycles it completes in 2 seconds.
  27. 27th March 1977A simple cipher shifts every letter 2 places forward in the alphabet, wrapping around so Y becomes A and Z becomes B. Encrypt the plaintext CAT using this cipher.
  28. 28th March 1977Write a loop in pseudocode that outputs every element of a 1D array named names of length 6.
  29. 29th March 1977A mono sound clip has a sample rate of 4000 Hz and lasts 2 seconds. Calculate the total number of samples taken.
  30. 30th March 1977State the type of program that is typically stored in ROM.
  31. 31st March 1977State one reason a small business might choose to use open source software instead of proprietary (closed source) software.